


Into the Woods

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Accidental Stimulation, Bisexuality, Coming In Pants, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Lycanthropy (sort of), M/M, MacGuffins, Multi, Pre-Poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 15:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13684674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: The best kinds of teamwork can also include competition. And the best kinds of competition are-- or can be-- sexy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter is gen; second chapter is... not. Takes place not long after "Slumber Party." As always, I'm curious whether this fits, or does not fit, your sense of these characters in canon.

The Danger Room would have been easier.

It’s weird, Sunspot realizes, for him ever to think so: isn’t he supposed to be charged by the sun, to be everybody’s vigorous, if sometimes cantankerous, ready-for-everything, fun-loving, fist-fighting, long-distance-running-if-necessary boy? (Boy, not man. When he’s a man, he’ll be Magnum PI; right now he can’t even grow the correct mustache.) Shouldn’t Roberto be happy that today’s training involves, not dodging robots in a three-story-high metal box, but running around on a scavenger hunt, outdoors, in the real woods, at the edge of the X-Mansion’s campus?

He should but he’s not, because he’s just frustrated, in the way that he’s also frustrated by academic stuff; in the way that he was driven to distraction—literally really distracted, unable to concentrate on the assignment—by what passed for social studies, and English, yesterday. When he agreed to join the New Mutants he did not realize that there would be ways in which Professor Xavier’s School was, in fact, a school. 

At least today’s thing is a test that he cares about passing. There is a techno-doodad in the forest and the team members have two hours to find it. It glows and emits electromagnetic waves of some sort. The one who gets it first gets bragging rights, if that team member is the sort of team member who brags. (If not, no one brags, and Xi’an gets to feel she did good.) If nobody finds it by twilight, bad things might happen. Or maybe just embarassing things. Kitty, who designed it, called it a MacGuffin, which Roberto doesn’t even know what that means—it sounds like the name of a TV detective? The exercise could take all afternoon. Kitty, of course, isn’t part of it, since she is very much not a New Mutant; she gave the blinking doodad to Illyana, squeezed Magik’s hand—what’s up with that?—and then watched Magik give the doodad to Logan, who went out and left it somewhere out there in the woods.

That was three hours ago. Since then they’ve been combing the trees and the undergrowth, splitting it up into segments, then trading off segments, at first very carefully, then less so, since everyone really does want to win.

They are competitive, these New Mutants. The idea is that heated competition among themselves will turn into team spirit when they have to face their very worst external foes—a day that Professor X keeps saying, though he must know he’s wrong, won’t come any time soon. They have been through so much already.

Sam has been overflying the area, swooping and circling back to see whether his eye can sense the doodad. Every so often Berto hears him swoop overhead, singeing the treetops. He likes hearing that whoosh: he likes (though he’d never admit) knowing his older friend is somewhere near. Rahne has been tracking; she wandered off an hour ago.

Warlock would find the MAcGuffin in about three seconds; this test is certainly not designed for him-- he still creeps Roberto out a bit; he's back at the X-Mansion interviewing the Danger Room, or hot-wiring the NY subway system, or something. It's a good thing he's so friendly or Berto would have.... real trouble staying his friend.)Mirage, when last seen, was standing very still and trying to listen, or sense, or something, to a sense of the forest that only she can hear; she had the same intense look that she gets with her horse. Xi’an has been—Berto really has no idea. How could she use her powers to find a hidden techno-doodad? 

How can he use his? He’s been doing what a baseline human would do in this situation— wandering around, veering off and then on the trails, looking for things that don’t’ look right. Apparently American kids do this kind of find-your-way-in-the-woods exercise at sleepaway camp all the time; apparently it’s fun for them? But not in Brazil. He’d rather play Zaxxon. Or go to the beach.

He’d rather not be alone. But he is, and he’s learning, apparently, discipline, pacing one more ten foot square, and marking the combed-over, leaf-strewn space with sticks. It’s September; there are fallen leaves. A lot of them. Just like there are a lot of oak trees, and pine trees, and maple trees, and whatever trees, trees Berto wouldn’t have seen in Brazil…. it’s been a while, it’s chilly, he misses Brazil, he doesn’t want to use his powers for no reason, it’s getting dark, punching something would probably be no use…

What if, rather than leaving the MacGuffin under some ivy, or in the crook of some oak limbs, Logan had actually buried it? He’s obviously capable of doing that, and fast; if that’s the case then not only would Sam have no way to see it; Berto would have no way too. It’s like a contest set up so that only some kids could win; for the rest, it’s empty.

Life can be like that. Sometimes it’s rigged in his favor: Roberto understands now—having spent so much time listening to Sam, watching Sam, arm-wrestling Sam-- what you don’t get if you grow up poor, and just how much freedom you get, without even knowing it, if you don’t have to care, when you’re ten and twelve and fourteen, how you’ll eat, where you will sleep, when you’re twenty-four.

Sometimes it’s rigged against Roberto instead. He wants things he knows he’s not very likely to have.

Not things; people. Usually, when he thinks this way, he has a brief flash of mourning, and then he thinks about Amara, and makes little jokes about how, for everyone else, she glows when she’s using her powers, but when Berto looks at her, she glows. But his thoughts do not necessarily stay there: they wander, his wishes wander, he thinks about kissing her sometimes and then he thinks about her kissing somebody else…

Was that her? There’s a brief flare of something that looks like lava at the edges of Berto’s vision: Amara knows better than to start a forest fire, but she might be trying to light up dark corners, or even use lava blasts to dig in hard ground. Why can’t Berto use his powers that way? He’s so frustrated that he turns black and begins to flare with his own solar powers: black spots of sun-driven energy spin outwards from his silhouetted form.

And then he knows. The device— like a bomb, like an electronic bug, like a spacecraft, like most of the techno-anything that the New Mutants would be invited to discover, detect, decipher, or de-fuse— has its own electromagnetic signature, and it interacts with the far larger and stronger electromagnetic fields of the Earth and the sun. That means it interacts with Roberto’s powers, when he’s turning on his powers, when he’s paying close attention to how they flow through them, how they strengthen him. And that means he can use his powers to find the doodad after all, the same way that homing pigeons (he had a friend whose father kept them, in Sao Paolo) learn to go home.

It’s about 50 meters away. Berto dials his powers almost all the way down—he’s no longer a black silhouette, but in the late afternoon, there’s a bit of an aura around him, like a rough draft of a charcoal sunset. He runs, around trees, past somebody’s hash mark, past Dani??, into a space between a few giant oak trees, where there’s a pile of brush, a kind of canopy overhead made of vines and netting, and nothing, and no one else around. 

Also no way to tell where the MacGuffin could be: Roberto’s sense of the doodad’s electromagnetic field, as compared to the sun’s and the Earth’s, can only take him to a plot of land, a space about the size of a house. Does the prof really expect him to use his powers, or maybe a shovel, to dig up something that could be the foundation for a new X-Mansion? What if the doodad is actually up a tree? Or, who knows, inside a tree? in the throat of a giant bird?

Does it make a sound? Berto’s never been good at listening—he tends to speak, or stand up, or throw a punch, first, and if he could drive he’d run lots of red lights. But this training exercise seems to be, in part, about standing still and paying attention. That’s what a good PI would do.

Sunspot powers on, checks electromagnetic fields; yes, it’s close. Sunspot powers off, looks, listens, sniffs, listens; hears four-footed animal getting much closer, maybe a mid-sized mammal, running, crunching dry leaves.

Oof! Rahne Sinclair nearly knocks Roberto da Costa to the ground before standing up and transmuting herself back into half-human, only half-wolf form. “Och!” she says. “I dinna mean to knock you over. But I’ve found what we’re supposed to do! I’d never have found out without ye.” She stops. “Without you.” She draws out the vowel sound in “u.” She’s been working on toning down the brogue, lest the people she meets around here—and she’s still getting used to meeting new people at all, American or otherwise—continue to misunderstand her.

“Rahne! I’m fine, but what do you mean?” Berto asks.

“You figured out how to find the secret doohickey,” Rahne says. “I couldn’t have found it myself—no bit o’ glass and metal could smell so strong that I could track it through the forest, even in my full wolf form. But I could track you,” she says. “And I bet you’ve figured out how to find the thing.”

She looks disoriented, a bit, maybe from changing so fast back into human—no, not exactly human—shape; is she trying to hold his hand?


	2. Chapter 2

Is she trying to hold his hand? Or is she trying to point his fingers forward, in the direction of what must be the buried treasure, the fetch-quest doodad, literally buried underground? 

Rahne, who is not exactly in fully human form, is sniffing the air, then bending over. “I can smell the metal now,” she says. “It’s close. It’s under there. It’s there!”

Berto realizes that none of the New Mutants could have found the device on their own: the point of the exercise was really to get two—or more—of them to team up. It’s always like that around here, with New Mutants, with X-Men: try to go it alone, and you’ll be slaughtered, or at best get nothing for all your work; find your friends and use your talents together, and you’ll be more likely to survive, and likely to get what you came here to do.

Which is, in this case, to get a shiny trophy and carry it triumphantly home, in celebration, because winning is fun in itself, and because winning means you are playing a game; trying to win means you care what other people think about you, means you have teammates, rivals, even friends.

Rahne, till she came to Westchester, never had friends. 

Berto lets that thought stop him, but not for long, because she’s already digging: she’s mostly wolfed out, she’s going to get the prize before he does, she’s going to piggyback on his discovery and carry the thing home herself. He can’t let her win, or can he?

There she is low to the ground, with her lower back, her butt, her tail in the air. Berto has never thought much about her tail. How does it feel to wag that tail, which is what she’s doing now? Does it feel like when he…

And now, Berto realizes, that the way to show Rahne that he considers her a friend, that he wants to stay close to her, that they’re a team, is to dig, dig, dig alongside her, to compete seriously for the shiny prize, to get right up close to her and find it before she does. He can’t just let her have it. He wants it too.

Berto powers up, black against the sunlight that’s still coming through the trees, and crouches down to dig, not with a stick—there’s no good stick handy—but with his powered-up, super-strong hands. It’s dirty work, and inefficient, but it goes fast, and it feels primal—what was the term they learned in social studies? Hunter-gatherers? Did hunter-gatherers dig like this? Not in Brazil, or at least not on the beach, or—wait, maybe they did! Berto realizes that digging through a mesh of musty leaves, getting into the soil, disregarding the flying pebbles, using his superpowers to do it, feels like digging in fine beach sand by the sea, years ago, with baseline human-powered hands.

Except now he’s digging alongside Wolfsbane, who is digging with both paws, her triangular ears extended, and not saying much any more. She wants the prize too. It should go to both of them, except that it can really go to just one—that’s how it feels; it’s newly exciting to compete this way, side by side, paw by silhouetted, super-strong hand, and as Sunspot crouches down, so that both mutants have their lower backs and their butts in the air, their weight on their knees, the Brazilian teen and the Scottish wolf nearly collide head to head.

But they don’t; they keep digging, finding the lantern shape, with its weird purple glow—are those lenses? or sound microphones?—and excavating the space around it until it simply pops out of the hole that Logan dug, like a spring-loaded toy, like a weak bottle rocket, landing right behind the pair of them, so that they both turn around, human-shaped teen and wolf-shaped teen, attempting to see just where it could land.

That is, the pair of them try to turn around; instead, they get tangled up and knock each other over, so that Roberto’s legs are wrapped around Rahne’s hind legs, and as he tries to stop himself from falling entirely over he finds that he’s got his right hand on her tail. 

The two of them tumble over, almost as if they were playing—what’s the name of that game advertised on the shows they’ve watched? Twister. It’s Twister, except that if they were playing Twister, they would have already lost; the pair of teens (one still in wolf form) have now rolled over almost completely, they’re wrapped around each other in a way that’s still a surprise to them both, and Sunspot has powered down, so that Wolfsbane can see him, while Wolfsbane is back into half-wolf form, still furry along her back, and on her legs, but with her beautiful naïve red-haired person face.

She’s sticking out her tongue. She’s trying to kiss him. She is kissing him. This is not what Roberto da Costa expected, but it’s definitely not something he minds. Where did the MacGuffin go? They’ll have to figure it out, but not just yet. They’re rolling back into piles of leaves. 

Now Rahne has disengaged from Roberto’s face and she’s… licking him! licking his neck, his clavicle, his shoulderblades through his costume, while holding his chest to her chests, to her definitely-present breasts. Her tongue is uncommonly raspy, abrasive, cleansing. It feels very good, very wrong, very right.

Berto has no idea where his own hands have gone, and then he realizes he’s stroking her tail. She’s changed back almost all the way into human form, but not all the way: she still has a beautifully fuzzy, inviting, red tail, and it feels very good for Berto to stroke it with one hand. The other’s around her waist, investigating the shape of her thighs through her costume. 

As he strokes her tail, her eyes light up, and her licking becomes more vigorous, and Berto can feel his own costume stretching and straining, his own thighs contracting and moving, shaping themselves around hers. She’s definitely not a wolf, she’s not a regular girl, she has a tail, they’re kissing again, she’s—she’s Rahne, and surely she has never had this kind of experience before? This kind of wrestling, jostling, tumbling, into the leaves, the twigs, the woods, with a very furry girl whose heart beats very loud under her ribs, with a girl who smells warm and wet and like garlic and cashews and maple leaves? 

Now they are in a very big pile, like somebody raked it up—it looks not quite natural—and the MacGuffin is probably very close; it’s glowing, but Berto’s not sure if he cares. He’d rather concentrate on the girl in front of him, who is, also, wagging her rapid tail. He’s got her left hand in her fuzzy, burry hair. Their noses touch. 

His costume—no clothes are off, and Rahne’s costume, as usual when she changes back out of full wolf form, has come back on—his costume is really tight on him, right now, and she’s got a warm, muscular, knee right up against his crotch, and it’s very, very warm, and very exciting, as if—I mean, this has happened before, it’s not like he’s never—but she’s so happy doing this, happy to do this in a way that neither she, nor he, have seen, and her short hair, behind his hands, feels so good when he strokes it, while stroking her tail, and is that her hand, her long, dirt-smudged, short-fingernailed, passionate hand, moving towards Berto’s hips, between them? Does she want to—is she—

Something is happening between Rahne’s thighs, right now, and Berto thinks, Berto knows, what it is: they expand and contract around his warm hand, and then they do it again, and her big, round eyes close and then open, her lips apart. 

And then something is about to happen to him, in him, when WHOOSH! there’s a glint of metal and a flash of purple light and then a lot of golden light and the three of them have been taken up in the air.

“Don’t worry,” Sam says as they snap the top branch off one tree, the clouds becoming visible behind him. “All three of us are nigh-invulnerable—“

“When blasting,” Berto completes the familiar phrase, and as he looks up at Sam Guthrie’s improbably strong jaw, his improbable, and recently developed, confidence in his ability to fly, to stay strong, to pick his friends up in his arms, two at a time, and fly them away, he realizes that Sam has a backpack on too, and that the lantern, MacGuffin, whatever, who cares what it is at this point, must be in the bag. 

Sam must have followed Rahne, just as Rahne followed Sunspot, to find the prize. He must have been tracking them both from overhead, and then swooped in to retrieve it once it bounced or launched itself out of the dirt.

Which means that Sam might have been watching, must have been watching, in the solitude of the X-Mansion-adjacent forest, the whole tussle, more than a tussle, between Roberto and Rahne.

And here he is, smiling, blasting through strong cloud cover (nobody could possibly see them from the ground at the moment), carrying both of the younger teens in his arms. He doesn’t even seem surprised. Since he can’t turn around very easily, he’s doing some sort of twenty-mile arc, a high-altitude U-turn, that takes them almost over the Hudson. (He’s been practicing. It’s increased his range.)

They are moving at who knows how many miles an hour, Sam Guthrie still can’t make sharp turns, and yet all three of them have the chance, in the sky, to feel like they’ve won; they know that Sam Guthrie won’t drop them. They’re not going to drop each other, either.

It’s a bit cold in the sky, plus Roberto is still wrapped around their Scottish friend. It’s a good thing Sam is so much taller than the two of them, with longer arms; he can hold them both easily, if they cling together, and they are clinging. 

More than clinging: Rahne has curled up a bit, but she’s still wrapped around Roberto. Berto is facing Sam; he moves his head a bit so that he can check out Cannonball’s facial expression, see if Sam is really still so happy, and Berto’s smooth cheek rubs against Sam’s stubbly one. They rub together, and Sam smiles, and Berto realizes that there are many things Sam knows, and hasn’t exactly said, and, also, many things Berto likes that he hasn’t exactly let himself say. The two boys rub their faces together, while Sam is still blasting, while Rahne and Roberto are still holding on, with Rahne’s head down near where Roberto’s shoulder rests underneath Sam’s chest.

Then something happens that hasn’t happened often, but has definitely happened before. Roberto’s own thighs move, suddenly, together, closing themselves around the Scottish girl’s knee, and there is a very sticky mess inside Roberto’s costume, very, very close to Wolfsbane’s own things. Sticky, and then stickier again.

Fortunately all their costumes are on, does she even notice? she has wolf-powered scent, she must have noticed, she is pretending not to notice, she’s holding on tight; and Roberto—oh, not again; yes, again! three times, does that part of Roberto ever, ever, stop? this is so embarrassing, maybe that’s the embarrassing thing that happens if nobody gets the prize, nobody comes to the prize, well (he thinks, and he’s thinking in English) somebody definitely came to the prize, no, make that two of us, or maybe three of us, because Rahne isn’t saying anything, she’s smiling, and Sam (whose stubble is, still, abrading Roberto’s cheek very pleasantly, while he has his hand on her tail) seems to have known exactly when to arrive.

Maybe this kind of discovery was the prize. Did Kitty know this sort of thing could happen, when she fashioned this mysterious object and sent it into the woods? (Has anything like it happened to her? She wouldn’t tell Berto, but she would tell Doug; and Doug would tell Warlock, and Warlock, once he understood, might very well say anything to anyone.) 

Sam is slowing down; there are no clouds, and the mansion is visible from above.

So that’s a thing they can talk about at some point, when they’re ready to talk; are they ready? Maybe it has to happen again. (First, though, a costume change; and a wet cloth, at least, to clean up. Would they clean up together? Not yet; not this time.)

They land on the lawn, and disengage carefully from Sam’s big shoulders, from his long, welcoming arms.


End file.
